"phpBB 2 uses a Fulltext search system, this has both advantages and disadvantages. The advantage is that on large or busy forums it has far less impact on server load than standard search methods as used by many alternative forums"

phpBB and performance I rarely hear in the same sentance without a word "NOT" being somewhere in betweeen .

I have benchmarked fulltext searching and it is notably slower then the current searching mechanism used by FUDforum. This mechanism is also MySQL specific and not available in the other 2 database systems FUDforum supports.

I've just realized that FUDForum's search is not exactly fast either. My Swish-E installation (which also indexes the forum) is at least 3 times faster and provides more functionality (like phrase searches, number indexing, etc.).

Is there nothing that can be done to improve the built-in search (speed and functionality)?